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Abstract

Recent advances in 3D scanning have made it feasible to generate highly detailed models containing hundreds of millions of triangles. One popular approach for rendering complex models is to use varying levels of detail (LOD). In particular, the progressive mesh (PM) has proven to be an effective data structure for representing meshes with LOD control. However, progressive meshes can be time consuming to generate, and the model being processed must fit entirely into main memory during simplification and rendering. When models contain hundreds of millions of faces, these issues can make it unreasonable to use PMs. We describe a system for generating and rendering progressive meshes for large models of arbitrary topology. By using hierarchical simplification and various optimizations (when creating a PM), and by using partial array loading (when rendering a PM), we are able to create and view progressive mesh representations of large models. In addition to describing the details of our system, we present the limitations of our current implementation, and we demonstrate some promising results. 1